(Rome, Monday 15 February, 2016) Just when the biotech
companies that make transgenic seeds are merging, the corporate vision of
biotechnology is showing up at FAO. At today’s opening of the three-day
International symposium on agricultural biotechnologies convened by the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome, more than 100
civil society and social movement and organizations (CSOs) from four
continents have issued a statement denouncing both the substance
and structure of the meeting, which appears to be another attempt by
multinational agribusiness to redirect the policies of the UN agency toward
support for Genetically-engineered crops and livestock.

The global peasant and family farm movement, La Via Campesina,
invited CSOs to sign the letter when the symposium’s agenda became
public. Two of the FAO keynote speakers are known proponents of GMOs, and
the agenda and side events over the three days include speakers from the
Biotechnology Industry Organization (a biotech trade group in the USA), Crop
Life International (the global agrochemical trade association), DuPont (one of
the world’s largest biotech seed companies) and CEVA (a major veterinary
medicine corporation), among others. FAO has only invited one speaker or
panellist openly critical of GMOs. Worse, one of the two speakers at the
opening session is a former assistant director general of FAO who has pushed
for so-called Terminator seeds (GMO seeds programmed to die at harvest time
forcing farmers to purchase new seeds every growing season), in opposition to
FAO’s own public statements. The second keynoter’s speech is titled,
"Toward Ending the Misplaced Global Debate on Biotechnology" –
suggesting that the FAO symposium should be the moment for shutting down
biotech criticism.

In convening the biased symposium, FAO is bowing to industry
pressure that intensified following international meetings on agroecology
hosted by FAO in 2014 and 2015. The agroecology meetings were a model of
openness to all viewpoints, from peasants to industry. But the biotech industry
apparently prefers now to have a meeting they can control. This is not
the first time FAO has been drawn into this game. In 2010, FAO convened a
biotechnology conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, that blocked farmers from its
organizing committee, and then tried to prevent their attendance at the
conference itself.

"We are alarmed that FAO is once again fronting for the
same corporations, just when these companies are talking about further
mergers amongst themselves, which would concentrate the commercial seeds sector
in even fewer hands" the CSO statement denounces.

It is clear, according to the Civil Society Statement, that
industry wants to use FAO to re-launch their false message that genetically
engineered crops can feed the world and cool the planet, while the reality is
that nothing has changed on the biotech front. GMOs don't feed people, they are
mostly planted in a handful of countries on industrial plantations for
agrofuels and animal feed, they increase pesticide use, and they throw farmers
off the land. Transnational biotech companies are trying to patent the planet's
bodiversity, which shows that their main interest is to make enormous profits,
and not to guarantee food security or food sovereignty. The industrial food
system that these companies promote is also one of the main drivers of climate
change. Confronted with the rejection of GMOs by many consumers and
producers, the industry is now inventing new and possibly dangerous breeding
techniques to genetically modify plants, without calling them GMOs. In doing
so, they are trying to avoid current GMO regulations and trick consumers and
farmers.

The agroecology activities were much closer to the way that FAO
should act, the Statement points out, "as a centre for knowledge exchange,
without a hidden agenda on behalf of a few." Why does FAO now limit itself
again to corporate biotechnology and deny the existence of peasant
technologies? FAO should support the peasant technologies, that offer the most
innovative, open source, and the effective pathway to ending hunger and
malnutrition. It is time to stop pushing a narrow corporate agenda, says Civil
Society. "The vast majority of the world's farmers are peasants, and it is
peasants who feed the world. We need peasant-based technologies, not corporate
biotechnologies."

"It is high time that FAO puts an end to biopiracy and to
its support for genetically modified crops, which only serve to allow a handful
of transnational companies to patent and to grab all the existing
biodiversity," said La Via Campesina leader Guy Kastler. "On the
contrary, FAO should support farmers' organisations and researchers engaged in
collaborative plant breeding in the service of food sovereignty and peasant
agroecology”.